AFTER GHOULISH RIVERS, warping hallways, and a talking owl, the train is thoroughly un-extraordinary. I watch the red, grey, and white tube approach through the tree trunks, while yellow lights flash around the platform, unnecessarily warning us of its approach.
I’m feeling a little silly that I put on a suit to ride light rail, but Willow’s sombre attitude is still freaking me out.
“Willow,” I look over at her. “Where are we going?”
“You mean ‘are we there yet,’” Willow says. I can feel her rolling her eyes at me, even if I can’t see them behind her veil.
“Yes. Will this train take us out of the maze?”
“Getting closer,” Willow says. The train pulls up to the platform and its doors slide open, waiting for us to board. “The train’s different for everyone, but eventually we’ll reach the wood.”
“The different wood.”
“Right.”
“And after that, we’re out?”
Willow jumps the track between the train and the platform and holds a hand out for me to follow. “After that, yes.”
“So after the wood—”
“We’ll get there,” she says. “But you’re going to have to trust me. Don’t forget your Bible.”
“You ripped its guts out.”
“Not entirely,” Willow says, thrusting the ruined book at me. “It still has the beginning and the end.”
I shrug and tuck the tattered book into my suit jacket. My Stetson, too, finds its way back onto my head. The other clothes I leave behind. Only the scarf is spared, I realize while boarding the train—Willow has wrapped it around her neck.
The train door closes behind us and the floor lurches. We begin to move.
Willow is still not meeting my eyes and I feel like something’s wrong. My palms sweat. There’s a lump in my throat.
But the train car is exactly what you’d expect. Grey poles rise throughout it so that those forced to stand can have something to hold onto. Not that there are other passengers, of course.
The sides of the car are lined by seats swaddled in red fabric, for the elderly, pregnant and insufferably greedy. I guess that’s us. Willow takes a seat on the left and, because something about this train spooks me, I sit on the opposite side of the aisle. I look out of the window to avoid looking at her.
The plains that sprawl across the horizon confound me. Behind me there’s a wood—the wood we left? But in front, nothing but hills. But there’s no snow there, and no sign of any glass tunnel that we would have wandered around for hours or days. There are also no farmhouses or crops or even a single plume of smoke to be seen—just blank, rolling grasslands, covered in mossy green and polka-dotted with wildflowers. It’s like suddenly stepping from winter into spring.
Other than the vegetation, the scene is eerily lifeless. No flies or bumblebees on the flowers, no gopher holes in the grass. No talking owls, at least none I can see. And, though Willow and I ride the train until the sun begins to sink low on the horizon, the scenery hardly changes.
Willow grows more and more restless as the evening wears on. I resist the urge to ask her if we’re there yet. The train hasn’t made any stops.
Willow, fidgety, starts to move about the train car. She stands, sits, leans her head against the window, and hangs on the metal railing. She doesn’t talk to me, and when I open my mouth to speak I still find my voice weirdly strangled.
So I stare out the window and watch the same hills roll by repeatedly.
Finally, Willow gives a shout, and I look up at her. She’s tugging on the door at the far end of the train car, a door that I’m not entirely certain is meant to be opened. “Over here,” she calls, and waves me towards her. “I’ve found the right car.”
But I can’t do it. Not yet. I lean my head back against the glass, ignore her summons.